Leo Hindery, man of letters

Since he's unemployed, Leo Hindery has decided to curl up with a good book: his own.

The ex-AT&T Broadband CEO is collaborating with Wall Street Journal cable/telcom reporter Leslie Cauley to write about the art of the mega-deal. It will draw on Hindery's deal-making in the late 1990s at the behest of cable titan John Malone. Simon & Schuster's Free Press division has picked up the book, which is coming out next year.

"It started off as sort of 10 deals, 10 lessons," Hindery said. "That sounded too pedantic." One thing it won't be is gossipy. It's not salacious; It's much more of an academic thing, something I would hope business school students would read."

However reader "will learn some stuff about the AT&T deal they don't know."

Cauley is taking a six-month leave of absence to work on the book. Hindery wouldn't disclose the size of the advance (his part's being donated to Cable Positive) saying that it was larger than he expected but "It ain't as big as Sandy Wiel's and Sumner Redstone's."
- John Higgins